One of my favorite capsule illustrations of French thought, also of Gallic wit, is something I found in a New York Times Book Review a number of years ago. In a quotation whose source eludes me now, a Frenchman said, “Of course it will work in practice. The question is whether it works in theory.” I don’t recall any such easy inversions in this book, but it has its little fireworks, among which is “Fashion is the worst scenario, except for all the others,” a statement that concludes Gilles Lipovetsky’s introduction.
This book, first published in France in 1987 under the title L’Empire de l’éphémère and published in Catherine Porter’s English translation in 1994, provides some bigger bangs as well. Maybe the biggest, which sociologist Richard Sennett, in his foreword, calls “particularly shocking to the traditional liberal reader,” is that by offering an ever-changing parade of stimulants and choices to our desires, fashion sidetracks us, so to speak, from taking “a deep interest in each other’s lives” (Sennett’s summary), which in Lipovetsky’s view is likely to lead to conflict--presumably over territory, morality, ideology, and the like, because those are differences on which we never agree. Fashion allows us to pursue differences that in one sense make no difference, despite often serving to mark distinctions, because it lies within the realm of the ephemeral (the word Lipovetsky used in his original title, remember). It doesn’t save us from ourselves--a point to which I’ll return--but from each other.
To be sure, fashion is not our only ephemeral pursuit these days, nor does Lipovetsky always use “fashion” in the strictly fashion sense. Sennett points out in his introduction (it’s a very handy summary, which I consulted in lieu of re-reading the entire book) that Lipovetsky “talks variously about clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices,” and other matters “all as ‘fashion.’” This is reminiscent of the way in which Jacques Ellul applied the French “la technique” in the book for which he’s best known in English, The Technological Society; there, the French term simply had a broader import than a single English word could capture. Whether “la mode” means more in French than “fashion” I can’t say. In any case, one point of Lipovetsky’s that is about fashion can now be extended even farther than he takes it. Regarding consumer goods, he says, “Manufacturers take independent initiatives in developing merchandise [that is, rather than relying on customer requests--one recalls Steve Jobs’s remarking that “Consumers don’t know what they want”]; forms of merchandise vary regularly and rapidly; models and series proliferate. These three major principles, which were introduced by haute couture, no longer belong exclusively to luxury clothing; they constitute the very core of the consumer industries.” Both within and beyond the marketplace, one now sees elements of design and forms of personal predilection employed and widely accepted, whether it be in designer toasters, tattoos, or entire lifestyles related to gender preference.
This is not an unadulterated good in Lipovetsky’s view. In a final chapter surveying the social consequences of his theme, he says, “Anemic social relations, difficulty understanding one another, a feeling that people talk only about themselves and do not listen to one another, all these are characteristic features of the final age of fashion, of the formidable thrust of individualist existences and aspirations.… The euphoria of fashion has its counterparts in dereliction, depression, and existential anguish.”
In a concluding flourish, he ends that chapter in this way: “Such is the greatness of fashion, which always refers us, as individuals, back to ourselves; such is the misery of fashion, which renders us increasingly problematic to ourselves and others.” This, one supposes, is that “worst scenario” to which Lipovetsky alluded at the outset; one has to think back to the rest of his statement--“except for all the others”--in order to be grateful that we in the Western democracies are at least not nowadays living through any of the others, which much of the 20th century conspired to illustrate for us.
I ought to stress, since my comments so far have barely mentioned it, that Lipovetsky deals often with fashion in detail, surveying, for instance, the accomplishments of Charles-Frédéric Worth in the 19th century and the major transformation in styles that occurred between the two world wars. Reading his book at a time when I knew little of the history of fashion (now I’m a little less ignorant), I found those details useful. But it’s his main argument to which my thought returns.